The Dacrecard might well be an effective way of rebuilding trust in newspaper journalists, but at the price of excluding the public from its rightful place in the democratic process.

I can see how Paul Dacre's proposal to certify journalists would appeal as a cure-all for the ills of an industry distrusted by the British public.

On the surface, a "GMC-style", industry-run scheme that bans journalists from all press events and briefings if they misbehave seems a great way to help restore faith in newspapers.

But that's entirely the point. Dacre's press-card system does an awful lot to help those in newspapers, but at the cost of gutsy, determined citizens who operate outside of the employment of big legacy media businesses.

By effectively handing the power to choose who attends press conferences to the newspaper industry, the "Dacrecard" system could kill off local voices holding power to account.

The digital revolution, and the dramatic drop in the cost of publishing that went with it, saw the emergence of passionate, dedicated volunteers who – fed up with the decline in local news coverage – chose to suffer long council meetings and dreary briefings in order to scrutinise those representing them.

Theirs is not a popular role. Many tell tales of obstructive council representatives and exclusion from meetings because they are not considered "proper" journalists. A press card they could never hold would only make matters worse.

"I'd imagine local authority press officers around much of the UK have a big smile on their faces today," says Simon Perry, co-founder of the Ventnor Blog which provides local news on the Isle of Wight.

"In a media market where the local newspaper press is potentially compromised by their level of income from the local authority, or where they're just simply uninterested in finding out what's really going on in the local authority on the patch, who will be able to find out and then publish the truth?"

It is this lack of status that makes it so difficult for civic-minded bloggers to get the same opportunities to scrutinise their elected representative as the mainstream press.

"We've never fully been accepted as press, we get press releases but we often discover the local paper or radio station have been briefed before an announcement when we haven't," explains Mike Rawlins, who runs the Stoke-on-Trent political blog Pits n Pots.

"Often we're told it's because 'we can't be trusted', which seems a bit rich seeing what's going on in the news industry at the moment."

While Rawlins has sympathy for press offices struggling to come to terms with the idea that all citizens can now publish stories about them, he worries that labelling journalists with a "Dacrecard" would not only make his life harder, but also help less scrupulous council departments to hide information.

"Any public body that wanted to bury bad new could use the press card requirement to stop citizens asking questions of their council and make it harder for controversies to see the light of day.

"Why only give an industry the ability to scrutinise power because it came first? Surely press regulation should be about how you report, not what type of company you work for?"